Doing maintenance on Chemtech's site

During the second half of July and the first half of August I was working on Chemtech's site doing some maintenance. It was a good job because I could get to know new technology as is the case of Liferay. Liferay is a great enterprise portal that allows you to create a complete website solution coded in Java.

I also could verify the quality of the new Eclipse 3.5 IDE codenamed Galileo that I used during the maintenance. It's a great IDE to Java developers. It has lots of plugins that allow you to work with practically any kind of programming technology inside a fantastic set of windows for every type of task. Before using Eclipse I had only worked with NetBeans to do Java development.

I improved my skills about Tomcat too.

Chemtech's site also known as chemsite

During a time like this you accelerate the learning process and get to know new things which are very important for any software developer.

After fixing some bugs on the site and writing in chemsite’s project wiki everything I grasped and did I came back to Volta Redonda for a two week job on CSN's MES; more on this in the next post.

You see, for the past 10 months I’ve worked with ASP.NET and Oracle (Braskem) and then I switched to work with Java and MySQL for 1 month (chemsite). Now at CSN I'm working with Visual Basic and SQL Server.

This shows that in today's world there's no bullet proof technology when we talk about programming languages and database systems. Each company has its own legacy systems that date back to two or one decade ago and such systems require certain types of interfaces developed in certain types of technologies. For example, if you look to 10 years ago (1999), C# wasn't even a programming language and so Visual Basic predominated during that time. It is most of the times impossible to a company to redevelop a really big system in a new programming language that is today's bullet proof. Those big systems consumed a lot of time and money to be constructed and in the future the programming language that is today’s bullet proof may not stand out.

As software professional you must act with any tool that is put in your hands.

I like what I do and no matter the tool I use I'm always satisfied with my job because of course, I do what I like to do, that is, software development.

To explain why Chemtech is a great place to work for in Brazil I think the above text says it all. In just 1 year I had the opportunity to work in different projects that use different technologies. A great way to leverage a career.

Thanks Jesus for that! :)